Reclaim Photography's Festival 'Reclaiming our Cultural Landscapes' is fast coming around; it will take place across a range of venues and galleries in Birmingham, Dudley and Wolverhampton, from 6 May to 7 June 2017. The international photography competition and exhibition attracted participation from amateur, student and professional photographers, from 56 UK towns and cities, and 36 countries world-wide.

To accompany the street events, a travelling gallery exhibition, hosted by Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (6-21 May) and Wolverhampton Art Gallery (23 May-7 June), will offer the public a unique opportunity to see a selection of these photographs.

Thirty of the prints from both the public events and travelling gallery exhibition will be auctioned off by Will Farmer of Fieldings Auctioneers, to raise funds for St Basils after the festival has finished and we can now announce this will take place at the Edwardian Tearooms, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham on Friday 7 July, 2017 (5-8 pm), so please put this date in your diary.

It will be possible to take bids online in advance of the auction (closing at 3pm 7 July 2017). (More details to follow).

Opportunity extended to St Basils young people

Earlier this year, thanks to Reclaim Photography and Regional Photographer Carl Hopley, young people living at St Basils schemes, got the chance to participate in a photography workshop and learn some professional techniques whilst photographing their own ‘cultural landscape’ around the streets of Digbeth.

Reclaim Photography Festival, West Midlands, also offered the same opportunity to Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council-Family Solutions and looked-after children and young people in Dudley. A joint exhibition of the photos will take place at the John Lewis Community Hub, Grand Central, Birmingham from 22 May – 7 June 2017.

An overall winner of this young people's exhibition will be announced at a separate celebration for the young participants with the chance to win a Sony camera, made possible thanks to Wex Photographic.

Festival organiser Maxine Watts said, “The Festival is committed to encouraging involvement from young people, particularly those most disadvantaged, and to developing partnerships with the community. So we were pleased to work with regional photographer Carl Hopley to create these special projects, culminating in an exhibition at the John Lewis Community Hub, Grand Central, Birmingham.

For this year’s Festival, photographers responded to our Festival theme, Reclaiming Our Cultural Landscapes, and to raise awareness and funds for St Basils charity. We were pleased to invite the young people at St Basils to participate through our Festival workshop. These two special photography projects offered children and young people the opportunity to record A Day in the Life… Hear Me… See Me… and to respond to this year’s Festival theme Reclaiming Our Cultural Landscapes”. We would like to thank Dudley MBC and Arts Council England for funding this special project.

Photographer Carl Hopley said: “I was really pleased to be given the opportunity to work with these youngsters, who truly entered into the spirit of the workshop and used the medium of photography to capture a moment from their lives; centred on a photo walk in Digbeth. Some chose a documentary approach whilst others went for a more artistic style recording abstract shape and form. For me, it was so important to demonstrate that photography, as a medium, is so inclusive, as it empowers people from all kinds of backgrounds to record what they observe and feel about the world around them”.

Barrie Hodge, Head of Fundraising and Communications at St Basils, said: “St Basils work is about giving young people a voice and so we’re really grateful to Reclaim Photography and Carl Hopley for hosting this workshop and teaching our young residents camera techniques to inject emotion and texture as a form of expression.”